Windows RSS Platform

Windows RSS Platform, included in Internet Explorer 7 and later and Windows Vista and later is a platform that exposes feed handling and management to Windows applications. The RSS support in Internet Explorer is built on the Windows RSS Platform.

Contents

Common RSS Data Store - The data store for all feeds managed by the RSS Platform. The RSS Platform API exposes these feeds after sanitizing, that is stripping it of scripts, embedded objects and other potentially malicious content. Access to unformatted XML for the feeds is also allowed.

Common RSS Sync Engine - The sync engine is responsible for downloading the content at periodic intervals. By default, it does not download feed enclosures, which are objects attached to the feed; however this behavior is user configurable. However, it uses Attachment Execute Services to prevent automatic downloading of potentially malicious file types. It uses Windows' scheduled tasks for scheduling and Background Intelligent Transfer Service for background downloading. In order to prevent the web server from being flooded on large number of feed downloads, it also adds slight random delay between requests.

Common RSS Feed List - The list of feeds subscribed to is exposed by the RSS Platform APIs. All RSS clients, including Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Outlook 2007, share the list. All modifications thus are reflected across all the RSS readers.

Permanently downloading and saving content downloaded through the feed such as a podcast to a user folder is not supported. Downloaded content is only stored in the Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files cache.